Click here to access a KALW article about the experiences of homeless students in Oakland Unified schools. Meet Naseem Bennett, read about his 2-hour commute to school, and learn why homeless students are less likely than any other group of students to graduate.

"In the 2016-17 school year, the Oakland Unified School District saw an increase of more than 50 percent in its homeless student tally. That's almost 1600 kids, according to the district’s McKinney-Vento office. And those are just the families the district knows about." -- Lee Romney

Today, the Enterprise Policy Development & Research team released a new report examining the connections between education and housing in providing opportunity. Creating Equitable Student Outcomes: How Housing and Education Policy are Intertwined looks at how segregation in education and housing prevents children across socioeconomic and racial/ethnic backgrounds from achieving the greatest possible academic success. It details the ways in which the United States has tried over the years to address disparities in academic achievement, and how housing policies and practices remain connected to those efforts. Access the report here.

"Throughout American history, racial segregation in schools has largely been the result of residential segregation. While Jim Crow laws in the South prior to the Brown ruling allowed for school segregation regardless of residential patterns, black and white communities generally existed separately from one another. As desegregation took place across the United States, many households made major shifts in choosing where to live. Numerous studies have examined the extent to which school desegregation and racial bias played a role in those shifts."

In San Francisco, the Walking School Bus program is designed to lower absenteeism while helping students begin their day in a safe and healthy fashion.

Abt Associates released a new brief from the Family Options Study that examines separations between parents and their children, as well as adult partners and spouses while staying in emergency shelters. The brief is available here.

"Families who use emergency shelter often experience separations between mothers and children before, during and after their shelter stay. While the reasons for separations vary, being separated from parents during childhood can be a predictor of future homelessness in adulthood."

To assist educators and policymakers in gauging their own efforts in serving homeless students, the Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness (ICPH) has published Out of the Shadows: A State-by-State Ranking of Accountability for Homeless Students. The report and state rankings are available here.

"The crisis of family homelessness in the United States continues to fall heaviest on the nation’s most vulnerable: its children. Despite decades of varied policy approaches and a growing body of literature on the impact of homelessness on the development of young bodies and minds, the number of children without a permanent home continues to grow, with close to 1.3 million students in public schools counted as homeless during the 2014–15 school year." - Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness (ICPH)

Click here to access California's state report card on the education of children and youth experiencing homelessness. According to the report, 4.5% of all California students enrolled in public school are identified as homeless. That's 235,983 students.

Click here to access the report "Well-Being of Young Children after Experiencing Homelessness." The report, a publication of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, found that "Twenty months after staying in an emergency shelter with their families, children scored worse in pre-reading skills and had higher rates of overall behavior problems and early development delays compared to national norms for children their age." Read more here.

"Unstable housing arrangements remained common during the 20 months following a stay in emergency shelter, with 41 percent of families reporting that, during the past six months, they had been in a shelter or a place not suitable for human habitation, had doubled up in someone else’s housing unit, or had moved at least once."

Outside in America is a year-long series on homelessness in the western US. The project focuses on people on the frontline of a devastating crisis and enables readers to take action to help solve the problem. The series, published by The Guardian and supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, seeks to answer such questions as: Why are there so many homeless people on the streets in the United States? What can we learn from their stories? And what can you, the readers, do to improve the situation? To learn more and access the series, click here.

According to the Institute for Children, Poverty & Homelessness, "Homeless students achieve proficiency on New York State standardized English and math tests at roughly half the rate of housed students. In SY 2013–14 only 1 in 8 (13%) homeless students met grade standards in English and less than 1 in 5 (17%) did so in math.The educational impacts of homelessness continue even after a student is stably housed. Students who experienced any episode of homelessness within the last three years score at the same lower proficiency rates as currently homeless students." To read the full report, click here.

Recently, the GradNation campaign released a ground-breaking new report authored by Civic Enterprises that provides insight into how educators, policymakers and community organizations can help more students cope with homelessness, graduate from high school, and have a better shot at adult success. Read the report to find outabout the lives of homeless students, what liaisons have to say, and what both groups say must happen to increase graduation rates and improve lives. ​

"Students experiencing homelessness struggle to stay in school, to perform well, and to form meaningful connections with peers and adults. Ultimately, they are much more likely to fall of track and eventually drop out of school than their non-homeless peers. Until this year, states and schools were not even accountable for tracking and making progress on their rates of graduation for homeless students." - Executive Summary, Hidden in Plain Sight